


Take the power lines back home

by lagardère (laurore)



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Small Town, Amnesia, Angst, M/M, Melancholy, Winter, far in the frozen north, there's light in here too I promise
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-29
Updated: 2019-05-29
Packaged: 2020-03-29 10:53:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,997
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19018444
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/laurore/pseuds/lagard%C3%A8re
Summary: When Jon returns to Winterfell, the slowly dying city where he spent his childhood, it's hard not to feel like he's failed at life.And then Theon comes by. Theon, who used to be everyone's standard for spectacular failures.





	Take the power lines back home

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted in February 2018 - this story went through a much needed edit :)

If Robb were to come back, he’d find everything much as he left it. 

His bed properly made, with the striped quilt of his childhood. His books shelved according to the colour of their spines. His dusty CD player, and inside it that jaunty pop tune they’d played on a loop for two whole months, on a summer holiday six or seven years ago. There’s a poster of  _ Aliens  _ tacked to the sloping ceiling above the bed and a game of darts hanging behind the door, with the darts sticking out as if a game had just been played. A game that Theon had won, of course. Robb’s best friend was good at darts and pretty much rubbish at the rest, which could be an issue when the rest included things such as “school”, “cooking”, “apologising”, and, more generally, “life”.

Robb won’t come back, no matter how much his mother wishes he would. He’s happy in the city now, an actual city that isn’t Winterfell, 200 inhabitants and snow 203 days a year.

Winterfell had started out as a trading post. Then there were rarely more than five or six families at a time, that and a few hunters. Money came from the trade of pelts, beavers and foxes and wolves. Then the timber industry came along, and with it the first train, and from then on the town had enjoyed a sizeable boom for a century or so, until the timber businesses moved to the other side of the valley.

The main takeaway being that Winterfell is vast and that it gives the appearance of being empty, that you’d need a lot of family ties in the neighbourhood to consider settling here, and that sometimes, Jon really wishes he was Robb.

  
  
  
  
  
  


When he arrives at the Starks’ house, and steps inside the room adjacent to Robb’s, Jon doesn’t find things as he’d left them at eighteen. “You’re welcome to use your old room”, Catelyn had said, but it doesn’t look like a boy’s room - doesn’t look like a bedroom at all. Since he left, she seems to have repurposed it as a cross between a sewing room, a storage unit, and perhaps a board-game room. He has to move three cardboard boxes just to sit on the bed.

Granted, he had only spent a few years at the Starks’, from the year his mother died until his departure for college. It’s not as if he’d been one of Catelyn’s children - merely the son of her deceased sister-in-law - and she certainly had enough children of her own to look after.

Yet it still smarts.

It smarts about as much as having to settle back in Winterfell, taking up the job that used to be his “saving money for college” job and trying to ignore how this side-job is fast looking like it might become permanent. Jon shelves his cans of tomato soup and green peas and smiles at the old ladies who come in with their hair nets and their multi-coloured grocery bags and he politely answers their questions. No, the sports career didn’t work out, and actually it was running, not tennis. Yes, he did go through surgery, on both knees, no, the writing career didn’t take off, and it turns out you can’t easily get a job with a degree in creative writing.

His worst moments at Jeor Mormont’s grocery shop have nothing to do with the talkative grandmas, though, or with the long periods during which the shop stays empty and Jon finds himself staring into space, wishing he still had the volition to dream another life for himself.

The worst is when old acquaintances walk into the shop. Old high school flames like Val, who’s now married to a trucker and who owns a big concrete house on the edge of town, with flower beds out front and a sign that advertises her shop (“Herbal Remedies and Spiritual Stones”). Val is kind and friendly and just as beautiful as she was in high school, with her ample curves and her flowing blond hair. Jon might be over her, and he’s certainly happy for her, but it’s difficult, sometimes, to talk to her and not be jealous of how at ease she seems to be with her life.

When she comes by, Jon finds it difficult to focus on anything but the fact that he still hasn’t figured out what he’ll do when Catelyn kicks him out, which she’ll probably do sometime soon; one can only go so long without a sewing room.

There’s also Doctor Luwin, who was already old when Jon was a child, and who used to set his twisted ankles and his sprained wrists, even as Jon proclaimed loudly that in two years’ time, he’d be a bona fide champion. Now, whenever Doctor Luwin walks in, Jon is tempted to hide his very much un-medalled, un-celebrated person behind a totem pole of Campbell’s soup cans.

But the doctor’s rare appearances and Val’s regular visits to the shop, to buy strawberry ice-cream and chat with Jon, are nothing to the first time Theon Greyjoy comes in.

Jon recognises him instantly, because he hasn’t changed much, neither in looks nor in style, with his fashionable scarf and his fashionable coat and his windswept hair, as dark as Jon remembers, though streaked now with a few premature white strands.

The white hair Jon only notices when Theon comes to lean against the counter, much like he used to do in their teens, like he can’t hold himself upright. “The weight of a father’s expectations,” Ned Stark had said once, which Jon hadn’t understood at the time. The only father he knew was his uncle, and Ned had never had any unrealistic expectations towards Robb or him. At the time, he knew little about Theon’s family situation.

He knew enough to be aware that it sucked, but not enough to feel sympathy. The worst of it he only found out years later, when he returned to Winterfell and heard how they’d found drunk old Greyjoy in a puddle of his own vomit after one of his brothers had stabbed him in the back. Literally stabbed him, with a rusty kitchen knife. It’d taken more than a few blows to kill Balon, but the drunkenness had helped.

The Greyjoys hadn’t fared well when the town began to die its slow death. There’s no building sailing boats without wood, and no sailing them when the sea has turned to ice.

Theon was a few years older than Robb and Jon, but him and Robb had been friends since childhood. Poor as people said he was, he had always had a sense of his own elegance. It was a mix of both worlds: old jeans and that fine black coat, polished leather shoes and a shirt worn thin at the elbows. An eye-catching hat, wide-brimmed and pitch black, paired with sleeveless gloves that he seemed to have salvaged from a horde of particularly angry moths. A cashmere scarf, and a large purple bruise on his right cheekbone. Jon used to think himself a pretty observant kid, but in retrospect he hadn’t been. Not when it mattered.

Jon has heard about Theon since he came back. “Good-for-nothing-Greyjoy”, the little old ladies call him, with their pursed mouths and their eyes shining in delight at the thought of the nasty details that they’re about to share with you. According to the local grannies, all the Greyjoys are good-for-nothings, especially Theon’s deceased father and his brothers, who (“unfortunately”, as old Mrs Potts isn’t afraid to say out loud) are still alive. The one notable exception to the family curse is Theon’s sister Asha, who won a scholarship and joined an engineering program for the Navy straight out of college.

Theon didn’t go to college. He joined the family business, or what was left of it. He drowned and came back.

This is how the story goes:

Theon was out fishing on the ice with one of his uncles. The ice broke and Theon got trapped underneath. The uncle went for help, or didn’t go. Help never came. Theon got himself out and they found him three days later in a fisherman’s shack north of Winterfell. “So far north that there’s hardly any of him left,” Mrs Jenley said, and Jon asked her to repeat, and she said the same thing, which he didn’t understand any better the second time around.

But it’s definitely Theon leaning against the grocery store counter, and his chattering teeth and white breath seem to indicate that he’s alive, if a little frozen.

“Cigarettes?” Jon asks Theon. He remembers that Theon used to smoke, like a damn chimney. It drove Catelyn mad - how much of a bad influence Theon was, on Robb, on the rest of her children. And yet she’d never had the heart to turn him out. For that was the crux of the matter: Catelyn Stark has a good heart, and deep down Theon probably had one, too, and no matter how much he used to act out, it was difficult to forsake a boy with bruises on his face and a smile that could have melted the ice for five miles around this frozen town.

“I don’t smoke,” Theon says.

He looks strangely thoughtful, like he’s trying to figure something out. Maybe what he came here to get, it wouldn’t be the first time. Some of Jon’s customers come in for something, forget what it was and then leave with something else. Mrs Patterson is an expert at this, buying cabbage when she meant to stock up on toothpaste. Unless Theon is having trouble recognising Jon. Jon doesn’t think he’s changed much, he’s certainly the same height he was back then, tall-ish, not as tall as he used to wish he’d become (not as tall as Ned Stark). It’s the same dark curls (his mother’s), the same grey eyes (also his mother’s, though he’s been told he had his father’s nose and his father’s bearing, whatever that means).

But the sky blue shirt he has to wear as an employee of the grocery shop could be a little blinding. Maybe that’s why Theon keeps watching carefully around him, like he’s desperately looking for a sign of what might have brought him here, to this tiny shop off the side of Winterfell’s frost-covered main road.

“It’s cold,” Theon ventures.

Jon stares at him as if he’d grown a second head.

Not so much because Theon is stating the obvious, but rather because it’s very much unlike Theon to do small talk. Theon is the sound and the fury, the endless rants about his family’s navigation skills and his future as a successful businessman and his many sexual conquests.

“I ducked in, because it was cold,” Theon elaborates - and, if Jon didn’t know Theon, he could almost believe that he’s embarrassed.

“Right,” he says blandly. “We have a coffee machine, if you want to warm yourself up.”

“Nice one,” Theon says, his smile flickering like a dying lightbulb.

“What?”

“Nice trick. Someone comes in to get away from the cold, you direct them to the coffee machine. Do you do that in summer as well, with the ice-cream cooler?”

This sounds more like the old Theon, apart from the part where he’s willingly speaking to Jon.

“Wouldn’t know,” Jon says. “Winterfell hasn’t seen an actual summer in what, seven, eight years?”

“Yes, the ice seems to have been here a while. Like this shop,” Theon muses, turning around to survey the plastic pool toys and the magazines from two years ago and the faded vegetables in their ageless crates with the splinters sticking out. “No offence, but how does a guy like you end up stuck in a place like this? I’d have hit the ground running. I mean... I did leave. I think.”

Jon considers how to answer this series of bizarre statements.

“I left too,” he says. “I came back. Like you did, apparently.”

“I’m trying to...”

Theon gives the shop another disconcerted look. Jon raises his eyebrows at him. He’s about to run out of patience. Experience has taught him that patience is usually wasted on Theon Greyjoy.

“I’m trying to jog my memory, maybe,” Theon says. “Find places I could have been to, back when I lived around here. This place must have been here and it’s the only grocery store for miles, so I’m sure I came here at some point, but I...”

Seeing the way Jon is looking at him, confusion and amusement quickly giving way to alarm, Theon plasters on a fake smile. It’s not convincing. Under the neon light, it even gives him the air of a ghost trying way too hard to pass off as a living, breathing human.

“I’m just rambling,” Theon says. “Must be the cold. I’ll grab one of those coffees and go. Instant I take it, yeah? Fucking typical...”

Jon watches him walk over to the machine and feed a coin into the slot

“You did use to come here,” Jon says. “Actually, I think Jeor caught you shoplifting a bunch of candy snakes. You were twelve or thirteen at the time. Robb was eight. Of course Ned and Cat thought you’d put him up to it. He never sold you out, though. Always said it had been his idea.”

Theon stands facing the coffee machine, his back and shoulders rigid. “You knew me.”

“Well,” Jon says, utterly at a loss how to answer that. “Since you were my cousin’s best friend, I did see you a whole lot...”

_ A whole lot more than I’d bargained for,  _ he wants to say, but something about Theon’s weird behaviour makes him hesitate. Even now, he’s expecting a flash of recognition. Theon turning around,  _ Stark! Didn’t recognize you in that ugly get-up. _

But when Theon turns back towards him, he looks oddly serious.

“Can you tell me things?” Theon asks. “Can you tell me things about me?”

  
  
  
  
  
  


Theon says it was his near-death experience, and Jon doesn’t really have a choice but to believe him. It’s hard not to, besides. This Theon is unquestionably different from the Theon of old, although the changes are subtle. It’s in his worried eyes, in the newfound clumsiness that has him spill half of his cheap coffee on the counter and apologise profusely.

The apology causes Jon to lose his words for a full minute. He keeps casting Theon puzzled glances, wondering if, instead of this professed amnesia, there might not be something else at work. Identity fraud. An alien abduction.

Anything would make more sense than this polite, subdued version of Theon. Sure, Jon has had moments when he wished the ground would open up and swallow the guy, but it’s one thing to want Theon gone, and another to be confronted by this pale copy.

The original Theon would have leaned elegantly against the desk, laughed at this substitute, and proclaimed, too loud for comfort, “Fuck, death would have been better than this.”

“... And so you got banned from the high school grounds. But you snuck back in with Robb the week after,” Jon shrugs, as he adds up Mr Bloomenbaker’s purchases (gum, a romance novel, two cabbages). “You papered the walls of the school gym with caricatures of the school staff, hand-drawn on toilet paper. I know for a fact Miss Poole still has hers... Mrs Cassel now. She got married. She used to have a crush on you. On you and Robb.”

“Little vandals,” Mr Bloomenbaker mutters under his breath as Jon counts out his change.

Theon shoots the man a surprised look.

“I wouldn’t take it personally,” Jon says, drily, after the old librarian has left. “I wouldn’t trust anyone who eats those rotten cabbages. I’m pretty sure they’re radioactive. Do you know they used to sink old submarines in the Long Lake, north of Winterfell?”

He slams the register shut and stares at it for a second as he remembers who it was, exactly, who told him that story.

“That’s crazy,” Theon says with faint admiration, at the story or at Jon or at the cabbages, it’s hard to tell, but Jon is slowly realising that one can’t be picky, not while working in a shabby shop in the middle of the tundra with only old stories to tell, and little hope of anything life-changing happening in the future.

So if Theon Greyjoy will give him one look of wonder - cocky and selfish and hard to impress Theon, with his effortless smiles and his lovestruck girlfriends and his glorious failures...

Jon will take what he’s given and live on it for days and not tell anyone that he did. “You’ve moved back in, then?” he asks.

“I’m renting a room,” Theon says, with a one-shouldered shrug. In the past, the gesture would have been accompanied by the stealthy appearance of a cigarette pack between Theon’s elegant’s hands.

“If you want my advice,” Jon says, “maybe you’re better off not remembering. It’s not like there’s much to do around here. This city has been dead a while. If you get a chance at a second life...”

“So much bitterness! You must have a hell of a tragic backstory,” Theon snorts. And again, Jon does a double take, because in this moment Theon sounds very much like his old self. Right up until he says, with a disarming grin, “But I beg to differ. I did find something here.”

He’s tapping the counter with a finger. Jon wrinkles his nose.

“Bad coffee?”

“An old friend,” Theon corrects.

It’s unbelievably cheesy and Jon shouldn’t fall for it but he does. He quickly pretends to look for something under the counter so he can hide an infectious smile.

  
  
  
  
  
  


 

“He’s faking it,” says Mrs Potts, decisively. “I know these things and I tell you, he’s faking it.”

Mrs Potts’ knowledge of “these things” extends to her husband’s arrest for corporate espionage a decade ago; he’d been caught red-handed in his competitor’s office with the blueprints for a new snow plough.

“I don’t know,” Jon says. “He sounded weirdly genuine.”

“The Greyjoys were always good liars,” Mrs Huckmont chips in, as she carries her crate of (radioactive?) carrots to the counter. “You can’t believe a word that comes out of that boy’s mouth.”

“What happened to that pretty girlfriend of yours?” Mrs Potts asks, purple nails clicking against the counter.

Mrs Potts used to hate Ygritte. She made sure the whole town knew. Whatever Jon says, good or bad, it’ll come back to him in a week or two, widely distorted, having been through the grinder of a dozen town gossips. When he’d told Mrs Potts he’d had to stop running, he’d heard later from Mr Tarly that Ygritte’s imaginary ex-girlfriend had smashed both his knees with a club, one night at the petrol station off Road 42.

“We broke up,” he says.

_ She broke up with him _ , he pictures her thinking. It’s almost like she’s taking notes, weighing what will give the story its fullest flavour. Sometimes he thinks that Mrs Potts would make a better writer than him. 

“A young man like you,” she laments. “Have you met my niece?”

“Leave the boy alone,” Mrs Huckmont says, gently reproachful. There’s hardly a thing about Mrs Huckmont that isn’t gentle. She’s cradling the crate of carrots as if it were her first-born.

(Hardly a thing, until you get her started on the Greyjoys, that is.)

“The father bled himself dry with those senseless orders of timber when no one had any need for his fishing boats.”

“Theon isn’t his father,” Jon hears himself say. 

The truth is, right now, Theon isn’t even Theon.

  
  
  
  
  
  


They sit on the bleachers, Theon leaning back on his elbows, black coat spread around him, while Jon looks out at the darkening field.

They must be sitting on an inch of ice – Jon can feel it slowly soaking the seat of his pants. He’d wiped the snow off the bench when they arrived, but if anything it’s made the bench colder and more slippery.

They’ve met several times by now, often enough that Theon has heard of every Stark sibling and of the Stark parents – not so much Jon’s mom, as this is a subject he tends to avoid, but rather his deceased uncle Ned and Ned’s wife Catelyn, who puts coffee in front of Jon in the morning with a sour expression on her pale face. Catelyn is red-haired and blue-eyed, beautiful and clever, and Jon has spent years seeking her approval. She is a writer, too, or rather, she is a real writer where Jon can only aspire to be one. Most of her books are thrillers, often set in the northern wilderness, though Jon has unearthed a few other things since he came home. Lovely books of poetry, liminal yet evocative, with haunting rhythms that have accompanied Jon’s walks in recent months. 

There’s little to do but walk and drink around here. For the previous generation, the generation that saw the factories close down, many a drunken walk had ended at the bottom of a frozen pond with none the wiser as to whether this end had been desired or accidental.

Jon hasn’t told Catelyn that he’s found her hidden books, the ones written under a pseudonym, the poetry and that one erotic novel he’d read in one sitting curled up in a sunken chair in the attic before putting it back right where he’d found it, refusing to consider 1) how bad it had been, 2) how feverish it had made him, and 3) how much he had misjudged the austere Catelyn Stark.

“Where did everyone go?” Theon asks.

“College,” Jon says. “Mostly. The younger ones aren’t done with school. Arya’s been noticed by a coach, she’ll start in the spring. She’s crashing with Robb for the moment, but she’ll have a flat soon.”

_ You should come live with me,  _ she’d said, his little cousin who’d always treated him like a brother.  _ You could write your novel. _

“I think I was jealous,” Theon says. He’s not looking at Jon but at the stars up above – that’s gotta be the one good thing about Winterfell, deserted as it is: the night sky has more stars than it does darkness. “I wanted to go, too, but it’s just not something we did. In my family.”

He’s begun to remember things, though not in a continuous manner, and nothing particularly precise.

Jon isn’t ready to ask himself why he doesn’t try to accelerate the process. He could call Robb, ask him to come up. Robb would. He’d drop everything to help Theon, even if they haven’t seen each other for years. He might even succeed; the very sight of him might act as a trigger, open the floodgates of memory or something like that.

Jon would once again become the boring cousin, the one who isn’t as funny, as charming and as reckless as Robb. Daring in his own way, but not in a way that makes it easy to make friends, or to stand out in a crowd, the way Robb does.

Jon isn’t so blind that he hasn’t realized how enjoyable it’s been to have Theon all to himself.

It’s not even that they try to run into each other all the time. It’s just that in this kind of place, you always eventually come across everybody else.

“The days are going to get longer,” Jon says. “Relatively speaking, given this is the far north, but in a week or two we could drive to the lake one evening.”

“The radioactive lake?” Theon says, with one of his surprised bursts of laughter. “I wouldn’t have pictured you for a romantic, Stark.”

In moments like this, Theon sounds unerringly like he used to. He sounds unerringly like he used to when he talked to Robb.

“Or we can keep hanging around the football field like we can’t get enough of high school,” Jon snaps. “Really it’s up to you. I don’t have anything better to do.”

“Don’t you?” Theon asks, thoughtful. “I looked you up. You used to be a good runner, didn’t you? You won a bunch of prizes for some short stories... What happened to you?”

There are different answers he could give.

_ I wanted to go home. _

_ I found out that my father was an asshole. _

Instead he gets up, focusing on how his frosty breath has practically solidified on his lips. “I’m cold,” he lies. “Let’s go home.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


_ Targaryen genes,  _ his father had told him, when they’d met out back of his house and Jon had withstood the cold with valiant determination.  _ We never get cold. _

It was also his way of saying,  _ Thanks for standing here for two hours because I won’t let you go in. _

Inside the house was Rhaegar Targaryen’s real family, the wife and children he had acquired before meeting Jon’s mother. “Acquired” was the word, as he assured Lyanna Stark on several occasions prior to Jon’s birth. He had married to ensure a merger between two companies. He had little love for his wife. Lyanna was the girl he’d have chosen to marry.

Be that as it may, he was married and married he would remain, and though he sympathised with her “problem”, there was little he could do about it.

He’d told Lyanna as much when she came to see him about Jon. Lyanna repeated it to her brother Ned, who had repeated it, much later, to Jon.

To Jon himself, Rhaegar said  _ I’m proud of you, son,  _ and Jon wondered for a while why this wasn’t as gratifying as used to think it would be. He’d let his father know he wasn’t after his money, and then he went back to the Starks’ and cried in his room for a while.

He wrote a short story about Rhaegar that won a national prize. Rhaegar was kind enough to let him know he wouldn’t sue for libel.

Jon replied, just as kindly, that there were little grounds, anyways, to believe that “Rhaegar Targaryen” and “Ronny Lizard” were the same person.

  
  
  
  
  
  


“You do spend an awful lot of time feeling sorry for yourself,” Theon says, before he leans forward, snatching a chip from Jon’s plate. “Like all writers.”

This Jon also remembers from before - these inane statements designed to make it sound like Theon knows everything about everything. Jon used to think this behaviour was a proof of Theon’s excessive confidence, and maybe a sign of foolishness.

Now that he’s matured some, he can recognise his irritation for what it really was (envy). He’s had time to ponder, too, that there are different kinds of envy.

His envy of Theon’s looks, of how casually he smiles, of how easy it used to be for him to exist in any setting, any situation, an easiness that is fast returning to him now that they see each other almost every day.

His envy of Theon’s social graces - or disgraces; of how everyone was drawn to him despite how callous and cruel he could be.

And a kind of envy that isn’t so much an envy of as it is an envy for - Theon’s smile like the playful bite of a cat that you can’t quite bring yourself to shrug off, because the pain is pleasurable, because it awakens something inside you, reckless and young and in many ways stupid, and Jon watches as Theon steals another chip from his plate, feeling Theon’s dark gaze on him all the while like a lamp burning hot, and he resists asking if he might not lick the vinegar off Theon’s fingers.

He imagines it, instead, Theon wordlessly offering his hand, touching his thumb to Jon’s lips and then pushing it in past his teeth.

It’s one thing to never feel the cold, but in the low-ceilinged pub, with the dirty old table sticking to his elbows and Theon eating from his plate, Jon realises that the reverse is also true: he hadn’t felt so warm in a very long time.

  
  
  
  
  
  


Jon and Catelyn don’t talk. They exchange pleasantries: a word of thanks from Jon for the coffee, or Catelyn asking how his day has been and then leaving before he can give a proper answer.

So it comes as a surprise one morning when she doesn’t disappear after setting the mug down before him, but pulls up a chair, and sits down at the kitchen table.

“How is he doing?”

Jon looks up from his cereal, so utterly puzzled that at first he doesn’t think to hide it. “What?”

Catelyn taps her hand against the table, visibly unnerved. She’s wearing her “I’m not ready for work yet” dressing-gown, white and fluffy though the fluff has gone patchy in places. She has another one for when she’s writing, peacock-patterned with large purple sleeves that fall away from her elbows. It makes her look like a pre-Raphaelite painting. Right now though, she just looks like Catelyn, with her downturned mouth and the faint, worried lines etched across her brow, and her long red hair in a messy braid over her shoulder.

“Hard to say,” Jon says. “Given the circumstances, I guess he’s doing fine.”

“You haven’t called Robb,” Catelyn notes. She gives him a considering look. “Should I?”

Jon bites his lip, trying to think of a way to say no. Something like,  _ He’s not ready yet _ .  _ The shock would be too great _ . But how could he make this sound believable?

“Another week,” Catelyn decides.

Jon looks up at her, startled. Her pale blue eyes linger on his face for a moment, and then she’s frowning, and looking away towards the fridge, at that drawing of a wolf pack that Rickon made in primary school over a decade ago.

Silence stretches between them, but it’s a peaceful kind of quiet, not the haunting, drafty silence that seems to inhabit the house sometimes, carrying the echo of Robb’s and the other Starks’ voices from one room to the next.

“How are you doing?” Catelyn says at last, her hand resuming its nervous tap-tapping on the table.

Jon takes it to mean that she’d really rather be doing anything else rather than have this conservation.

“I’m fine,” he says, trying for a smile.

Catelyn surprises him by smiling in return. “You’re as bad a liar as Ned used to be,” she says.

  
  
  
  
  


 

“Hey,” Theon calls as he strides through the door.

Jon raises his eyes in time to see him filch a handful of candy snakes from the plastic box. The snakes disappear from Theon’s hand, replaced by a pack of cigarettes. Not the ones he used to smoke, back when Jon was in high school and Robb’s room would smell like Theon’s cigarettes. That was on a good day. Most of the time, it smelled like pot and a teenage boy’s mess of leftover take-out and unwashed clothes.

“You can’t smoke in here.”

“What?” Theon says, startled. “But it’s minus a billion outside!” 

Jon shrugs. “Then don’t smoke.”

Theon gives him an insolent grin.

“How busy are you?”

  
  
  
  
  


 

Jon taps the heel of his boot against the asphalt, trying to dislodge the snow. Gloved hands deep in the pockets of his jacket, scarf wrapped snugly around his neck, he watches as Theon takes a long drag of his cigarette, the rapture evident on his face, verging on indecency - eyes shut tight, lips parted on a faint whiff of smoke.

“In your place, I’d have taken the opportunity to stop,” Jon says.

“Jeez, were you always such a stick in the mud?” Theon exclaims, and adds, immediately, “Don’t answer that.”

“Whatever makes you happy,” Jon grumbles.

“Yes, you have been very considerate,” Theon muses. “Maybe it’s time you got rewarded for that.”

Jon casts him a suspicious look as Theon sidles up to him, bumping their shoulders together. “Open your mouth,” Theon says.

Jon’s distrust intensifies, even as his heart begins to drum a different tune, one of want and frantic fear.

“I’m not smoking,” he manages to say, before the panic gets a chance to swallow up his words as well.

“I know,” Theon says, his patience tinged with disdain. “I wasn’t going to force you. Open your mouth.”

Jon keeps watching him through narrowed eyes, his mouth obstinately shut. Theon heaves an exasperated sigh. Cigarette clamped between his teeth, he rummages in his pocket until he finds one of the candy snakes, and he reaches for Jon’s jaw - doesn’t have to apply much pressure to get Jon to comply, this time, the threat having been identified - and he places the sugary piece of candy on Jon’s tongue, thumb sliding beneath his chin, pushing his mouth closed.

Jon rolls his eyes but he sucks on the sweet, obligingly, fighting not to wince at how acid it is, at how strange it feels to rediscover the taste after so long.

“Thief,” he says, meaning it as a joke, though it comes out accusatory and slightly muffled by all the sugar in his mouth.

“Yeah,” Theon grins, and wrapping a hand around the back of Jon’s neck, he kisses him on the mouth.

Once Jon had said to Robb, “He must be really good at it, or the girls wouldn’t flock to him like that, not with the way he treats them.”

And Robb had answered, an unfortunate joke: “Maybe you should try it for yourself, if it fascinates you so much.”

Either it’s innate or it’s one of these things that Theon hasn’t forgotten, because it’s indeed a distractingly good kiss. Jon can tell that it’s been tailored for him, too, and maybe that’s where Theon’s talent lies - in this ability to read Jon’s desires like an open book, so that the kiss is aggressive and invites aggression in return, with biting teeth and an intrusive tongue, and Jon’s hands in Theon’s hair, and Theon roughly palming the front of Jon’s trousers and smiling against his mouth when Jon issues an unconvincing sound of protest.

“Who’s going to see us?” Theon laughs.

“Everyone,” Jon says, but by now he’s almost laughing as well. “I guess that’s the point.”

“It kinda is,” Theon agrees, and he pushes Jon back against the door, pulling down his scarf to gain access to his throat. “Dear old Mrs Potts.”

“Dear old Mrs Potts,” Jon concurs, voice faint.

  
  
  
  
  


 

Jon has never been particularly willing to write about himself, but this is different. As the weeks go by he begins to jot down bits and pieces as the clients come in and out of the grocery store, and as he watches the citizens of Winterfell make their way up the slippery street. There’s Davos the postman making his rounds in the morning, and the small kids playing in the now, and the older kids waiting, bored, at the bus stop, much like he used to. There’s Lysa Arryn’s careful little patter as she lets her husband walk far ahead of her, the better to exchange glances with Petyr Baelish, who stands behind the window of his insurance company.

Slices of ordinary life at a northern outpost. Beyond the limits of the town it’s the great unknown - acres and acres of snow in every direction, broken only by the occasional forest, where even walking beneath the snow-laden trees is a hazard. And inside the town the people’s daily lives blend in with the stories they tell about each other, and every story covers the previous ones like a fresh coat of snow.

Sometimes a person’s lies can tell more about them than any hard fact. Like how people say Petyr and Lysa have been plotting to murder Lysa’s husband, the old Jon Arryn, for the better part of a decade. This particular tale reveals how the town is envious of Petyr, who had the profitable idea to come and sell insurance policies in a town where the number of life-threatening hazards is ridiculously high. It reveals how people in Winterfell resent Lysa, who won’t give them the time of day. And it reveals a selective blindness on Jon Arryn’s part, because the man knows he’s not getting any younger and he doesn’t care to fight his wife’s inclinations. On Lysa’s side there’s foolishness, because Jon has also seen how Petyr watches her sister Catelyn. And on Petyr’s side a bit of both, foolishness and blindness, because he should know that he’ll never get anything from Catelyn. She’s far too attached to her dead husband, tall and stern and grey-eyed Ned, to look at a slimy salesman.

Jon is well aware that he also has his own biases. But every writing is, after all, a work of fiction, and he’s more than willing to give Petyr his due, ever since the man had pulled him aside to tell him, in a pleasant voice, to “scamper back south with your gloomy face, and leave Cat alone”.

  
  
  
  
  
  


“I think you should be more careful.”

Sam is Jon’s best friend. For some unfathomable reason, he’d decided that Winterfell would be a great place to pursue veterinary studies, and he’d interned at the local practice for two years before he moved back south, finally listening to his pregnant girlfriend. Gilly had been born and bred in the north and she had no intention of raising her kids there.

Jon hasn’t told Sam about Theon. Or rather, he has been cutting out significant portions of his life from his accounts to Sam, like the fact that he hasn’t been getting much sleep lately. Snatches, only, between the moment he drifts off drooling on Theon’s shoulder and the moment either of them wakes up on the other side of Theon’s bed, and rolls over, and reaches for warmth with demanding hands.

Jon’s been nodding off at the register once or twice, but the jingling of the doorbell generally jolts him awake.

“Careful about what?” he asks, with considerable dishonesty. Sam sighs. Jon can hear a baby crying in the background.

“What if he gets his memory back?” Sam says. “And he becomes the same old asshole. What will you do then?”

“Burst into tears?” Jon suggests. “I’ll move on with my life. Until a week ago, my main prospect in life what to inherit Mormont’s crumbling castle someday, so you’ll excuse me if I’m grasping at straws.”

“The grocery store’s not a bad bargain,” Sam argues - weakly, in Jon’s opinion. “It’s one of the main shops in town. It might not be a castle but it’s not like you  _ need  _ a palace, you know...”

“I know, that’s not...”

“... And Theon Greyjoy can’t be your  _ prospect _ . He can’t be anyone’s prospect. If you’d told me he’d come back reformed or something, I’d have had a hard time believing you, but amnesia? That doesn’t exactly qualify as becoming a better person.”

“He wasn’t a bad person to begin with.” Jon leans his forehead against the kitchen window, looking out at the fast falling snow. “We didn’t get along, that’s all.”

“Be careful, is all I’m saying. You do sound...” Sam hesitates. “You do sound happier than the last time we spoke. I guess that’s a good thing.”

“How’s Gilly?” Jon asks, stepping away from the hypnotic ballet of snowflakes and wind and the occasional red flash of a car driving past the Starks’ front yard. “How’s Sam Junior?”

“Don’t call him that,” Sam mumbles, and the conversation finally moves to safer grounds.

  
  
  
  
  


 

There hadn’t been anyone, for Jon, not since Ygritte - there hadn’t been any men, ever, until Theon - and it takes some getting used to, this new thing between them, despite Theon’s seemingly careless words of praise, which he keeps dropping, out of the blue, for Jon to catch, like crumbs or coins, losing them on a forest floor,  _ You’re actually quite the handsome one, Stark _ , things that he can’t possibly mean.

The drawled-out  _ Stark  _ is more dangerous than the rest, it gets under Jon’s skin far more easily, because it’s what Theon used to call Robb.

“You’ve got good arms,” Theon says now, breath stirring the hair at Jon’s nape. “Must be all that cabbage lifting.”

Jon turns over, forcing Theon to move off his back. He gives him the dubious look he generally reserves for such compliments. And then his eyes travel upwards, towards the bright blue shark hanging from the ceiling fan.

The first time he’d come here, Jon had made a comment about how bare the room was, and in typical Theon fashion, Theon had extrapolated this remark to a ridiculous degree. He’d bought half the plastic pool toys from the shop, so that there was now a whole menagerie inside his room; not only the shark but also a pair of pink rabbits by the door, and a family of rainbow-coloured rubber ducks below the window, and an inflated fawn beside the wardrobe.  _ Should I start calling you Snow White?  _ Jon had asked, and Theon had flicked his chin and said,  _ Between the two of us, we both know who’s the princess with the snow fetish. Snow Jon. Jon White. _

And Jon had hidden a grimace inside Theon’s pillow, lips tightly pressed together, refusing to tell Theon that this joke was about as old as him, because Robb had taken to calling him Snow when they were kids and like most unfortunate nicknames, it had stuck.

“I’ve got a question for you,” Theon says.

Jon shakes his head, dislodging the hand pulling on his dark curls. “What?”

“Were we... You know. Before.”

Jon clears his throat.

“No.”

_ We weren’t even friends. _

Theon’s thoughtful expression doesn’t last, quickly replaced with joyous mischief.

“How long have you been wanting this?”

“Shut up,” Jon mutters. “You were different. Things were different, it wouldn’t have been... It wouldn’t have crossed my mind.”

“Yeah, right. I can’t have changed so much, hm?”

There’s a real question here, and though Jon knows what he should answer (“I guess not”) and he’s long made up his mind on what a truthful answer would be (“You changed so much you’re barely the same person”), he finds himself stalling.

Because this Theon - insufferable and self-assured and wickedly funny - is not so different from the Theon Jon knew.

The only thing that has changed is his interest in Jon.

“Change doesn’t have to be a bad thing,” Jon says, wondering how much of a liar that makes him, he of the daily routines, who lives in a place too frozen to shift and change along with the seasons.

  
  
  
  
  
  


In the mornings Winterfell is draped in mist, so that even when the sun comes out, it feels like running through curtains of gauze, and Jon tears through layer after layer as he makes his way across the frost-covered fields and into the woods on the edge of town.

The forest path makes for a good run: about 8 miles overall, with the heart tree in the middle acting as a marker. Ned Stark had carved a face in the tree to amuse them as children, a lot scarier than he intended with its sinister pout. Two tracks of moss run down from the deep set eyes, making it look like the tree is crying.

In Theon’s words,  _ Pocahontas would freak out. _

But Jon remembers how his cousins Sansa and Bran used to spend hours talking to the sad face, how him and Robb and Arya used to stage sword fights in the clearing. When his mother’s health had started to fail, she often insisted they walk from the house to the heart tree, as a way to test her remaining strength.

Jon runs past the tree and keeps going, following the path as it winds up the side of a hill, making sure to avoid the protruding roots and the occasional patch of ice. He relishes the harsh, steady rhythm of his breathing, the way his legs are responding to the effort. His knees are still a little rusty but it doesn’t matter, he can feel himself getting better, day after day. Not running faster exactly, not yet, but with a greater fluidity of movement, and with every outing - with every night spent straddling Theon, pinning him to the bed with his knees and thighs, his body taut and responsive, following his every command - he starts to believe what the surgeon had told him, when he’d found him staring at his bandaged knees after the surgery.

_ This doesn’t have to be the day your life comes to a permanent stop. _

The path emerges from the woods at the top of the hill. In the distance the town is still draped with a low-hanging mist, besieged by the tangible but deserted shapes of factories and lumber yards.

Winterfell looks almost beautiful in the sunrise, as if the world had temporarily forgotten to be cold and unforgiving - as if it had decided that, since it couldn’t do much about the cold, it would try to be kinder at least, and welcome you home.

When Jon returns, there is warm coffee in the pot. Catelyn has made herself scarce these past few days, maybe because she doesn’t want to have to ask him where he spends his nights.

Jon settles in the kitchen with a notebook and a mug of coffee, thinking he’ll write before work, but his mind keeps drifting - out the window, towards the sunlit snow, towards Catelyn’s gloves on the counter that she must have forgotten before leaving for her own jog. And when he manages to stop staring at the gloves he starts thinking about Theon - Theon who’d said, before he left,  _ Maybe I’ll stick around until spring. _

_ There won’t be a spring,  _ Jon had pointed out.

_ My point exactly,  _ Theon had said, with a self-satisfied smirk.

Jon is pulled out of his thoughts by the sound of steps coming down the stairs. A real stampede: someone unfamiliar with the house would have thought that there were several people in the staircase, except that Jon has one too many memories of following a step behind those careless, trampling feet, while Catelyn called up from the landing, “Am I raising real human boys or a herd of elephants?”

Robb stops short in the doorway. He seems to have lost a fight to his pillow - there’s traces of it on his cheeks and his red hair is a wild mess. He’s still blinking sleep out of his eyes, but his face lights up when he sees Jon, and before Jon can say anything, or wipe the stricken look from his face, Robb has crossed over to the table, lifted him off his feet and crushed him to his chest in an enormous bear hug.

“Snow!”

If it’d been anyone else resurrecting the old nickname, Jon might have thrown a punch, but history has taught him that it’s no use being angry with Robb. It always ends with him feeling awful about the fight, and apologising, whether he thinks he’s done wrong or not.

“You’re here about Theon,” he guesses.

“Yeah,” Robb says with an expansive sigh, as he leans back against the counter. He picks up his mother’s wine-coloured gloves and flips them idly over in his hands. “I’m meeting up with him now. It’s a weird story, right? Thanks for... being around for him. Mom told me you guys had been spending time together. I’d have come earlier if I’d known.”

“You know Winterfell,” Jon says with a faint shrug. “Worst signal in the country.” 

_ Was Theon into guys before?  _ he wants to ask.  _ Or is that a new development? _

Robb sets the gloves down and rubs his hands. “Well. I’ll head out, can’t exactly make him wait any longer, can I? But I’ll swing by the store later. Get to see how that horrible shirt fits you these days.”

“About as well as it did six years ago,” Jon grumbles, but he doesn’t put much heat into it. “Give me a minute and I’ll head out with you. I’ll be late if I don’t leave soon, and then what will the good people of Winterfell do?”

“Take up hunting,” Robb suggests as they head down the hall together, shoulders bumping as if they were still unruly teenagers. “Doctor Luwin with a bow and arrow, can you picture that?”

Jon laughs. It’s difficult not to feel joyous when Robb’s around, even if he knows that the wind will turn the moment Robb is out of sight.

Then he’ll be able to think about how much Robb’s appearance is going to cost him.

It needn’t be difficult, or so Jon tells himself. He’s been alone before, he’ll just have to get used to it again. To the loneliness, and to the shame, when Theon finally comes to his senses and he decides to tell Robb ( _ Fucking Snow, can you believe it? _ ). For a time Robb will look at Jon weirdly, but this won’t last. Robb is good-hearted. Jon has no doubt that he’ll get over it.

Theon is another matter. Theon will mock him and scorn him and it’ll last until either of them dies, a long time from now probably, since Jon suspects that they’re both extremely hard to kill.

  
  
  
  
  


 

He arranges the fruits and vegetable on their respective displays, with tomatoes on both sides so Mrs Jenley and Mrs Potts won’t have another hour-long argument on the subject. He hangs up the remaining pool toys and exhumes a set of ten-year old magazines to replace the two-year old copies that have been on the shelf for the past six weeks.

He sits down and gets up, first to get coffee and then to go to the bathroom and then to rearrange the magazines, and when he runs out of things to pretend to be doing, he looks for his notebook, finds that he’s forgotten it at the house, and lays his head down on the table with a dispirited sigh.

The doorbell chimes.

“Not very professional of you, is it?” Val laughs.

Of all the people who could have visited the shop this morning, she might be the only one Jon can stand to have a conversation with. He almost sighs in relief.

“It’s my in-store persona. I promise I’m not as cool after hours,” he says.

Val lifts a pair of red-rimmed sunglasses from the column above the counter. Jon lets her slip them onto his nose.

“There,” she smiles. “Now you look the part.”

“The part of the dashing shop assistant?”

“Shop assistant, rockstar, it’s all the same to me. Do you have any avocados?” Jon lets the glasses slide an inch down the bridge of his nose.

“Do I look like I sell avocados? This is a serious shop, ma’am.”

“A serious shop,” Val repeats, pushing an inflated dolphin with a finger so that it starts rotating on itself, getting tangled with a grinning flamingo. “Well, I suppose I’ll have to make do with cabbage, then.”

“You and the rest of us,” Jon says wearily, but she must have thought he meant it as a joke, because she starts laughing again.

“Here,” she says. “I made you this.”

Jon gingerly picks up the small canvas bag. She’s tied it with a little string. When he brings it to his nose, he gets a whiff of pine, something of the Wolfswood’s mossy undergrowth.

“To clear your head,” Val says. “You can carry it around, or burn it if you prefer.” 

“Thanks,” Jon says, puzzled. “That’s really nice of you.”

“You have the cutest smile, you know that?”

She picks up one of the cabbages and comes to drop it on the counter, spraying dirt all over his ugly blue shirt.

“Do I get a discount? As your favourite customer?”

Jon is still smiling minutes after she’s left, as the phone behind the desk begins to ring; as he picks up and Theon says, “Stark.”

“How are you?” Jon asks, barely conscious that his fingers have begun to make a mess of the strings of Val’s gift.

“Good. You?”

“Good.”

“Liar,” Theon says.

Jon’s laugh is ugly and brief. “What makes you say that?” 

“Robb came by.”

“Productive visit?” Jon asks, raising his head as the bell rings and the old doctor comes in, bringing with him a gust of cold wind that further tangles the dolphin and that absurd, smiling flamingo.

“What did you think would happen, exactly?” Theon asks. “I’d go back to being a selfish asshole, you’d go back to being a moping bastard?”

“If that’s how you want to...”

“You’re an idiot, Snow,” Theon says, but it’s not without warmth. “I remembered you weeks ago.”

“Shit,” Jon says mildly, as the doctor looks up from the apple stand, eyebrows raised.

“I’ve been spending all my time with you. It makes sense I’d remember you first,” Theon notes.

“You could have said.”

“I figured I owed you one,” Theon snorts. “You weren’t exactly straight with me either, were you?”

Jon remains stubbornly silent. After a while, Theon sighs. “So that was the first thing that came back. You pulling a face at me, something like, what, ten years ago? Then I remembered Robb and the rest of the clan. Then that fishing trip.”

“You mean...”

“Yeah. I don’t remember much, mind you. How freaking cold the water was. Most painful thing I’ve ever felt in my life. It’s true what they say about how it’s like being stabbed... I’ve been stabbed, so I would know. It was a lot worse than that. And just trying to move... I don’t remember the rest. Like what my uncle did, you know, if he watched me drown or if he tried to help. Knowing him, the first option sounds a lot more likely. But there’s a gap between the moment I went under and the moment I woke up in that shack, and I don’t think it’ll get filled any time soon.”

“I’m glad you didn’t drown,” Jon says. “And thanks for pretending, I guess. That you were... into me. And all that.”

He’s so busy trying to hide from the doctor’s inquisitive glance that he almost misses Theon’s answer.

“Who said anything about pretending?”

  
  
  
  
  
  


He swings by the house to drop off his things and grab a warmer coat. Robb and Theon are waiting for him at Castle Black, a pub that its owner likes to call “the shield guarding us against the frozen wastes”. Jon is both dreading the meet-up and looking forward to putting it behind him.

_ I haven’t told Robb yet _ , Theon had said, with characteristic glee.  _ The honour is all yours. _

_ Maybe I’ll just kiss you,  _ Jon had replied, trying to dismiss the fact that it was now the doctor and Mrs Jenley AND Jeyne Cassel in the shop, and that they were all listening while pretending not to listen.  _ It would get rid of any ambiguity. _

He doesn’t expect Catelyn to be home, but he’s barely stepped inside the house that he hears her calling from the kitchen.

“Jon?”

“Yeah?” he calls back hesitantly, one hand already gripping the banister of the stairs, his foot raised above the first step.

“Could you come here a second?”

He finds her sitting at the table, with a cup of tea by her elbow and a cigarette in her hand and - his eyes go wide - his notebook open before her.

“You didn’t leave it on purpose, then,” Catelyn says, as she takes in his expression. “I did wonder.”

“You wondered and yet you still  _ read it _ ,” Jon points out, unable and unwilling to curb his tone because at last, he has the upper hand.

“Curiosity,” she explains. “One page led to another...”

“Can I get it back?”

He extends his hand.

Catelyn puts out her cigarette and drops the stub into her empty mug. She holds a pale hand against the page, thoughtful.

“Do you intend to do anything with these?”

Jon thinks of the stories, a hundred pages worth of small town memorabilia pressed between two red plastic covers.

“I don’t know,” he answers, truthful. He has tried sending two of the stories to the one editor he knows, and one of them will be published in the guy’s magazine, but that’s hardly going to be life-changing, given the distribution of the _ Onion Reader. _

“They won’t sell,” Catelyn says, as if she’s been reading his thoughts.

Jon makes himself meet her eye, to try and convey that this isn’t news to him and that her opinion doesn’t matter.

“They won’t sell and it’s a shame,” she goes on. “I think they’re fairly good.”

Jon stares at her, too surprised to keep up his pretence at carelessness, and the surprise only grows when, still holding his gaze, Catelyn offers him a shy smile. Finally Jon is able to take her in - really take her in, sitting at the table in that lovely but faded peacock dressing-gown, solemn and so very lonely. There was a time when this house seemed to overflow, with noise and mischief and warmth, and Jon remembers the winter holidays, when his mother and Ned and Catelyn would sit together in the living room while the wild horde of children roared past them, Robb and Sansa and Arya and Bran and Rickon, and also Jon, and often Theon, too.

And now Catelyn is trying to make a life for herself with all of them gone, all of them but Jon whom she’d never liked in the first place.

Catelyn winces, as if, again, she’d followed his train of thought. Her gaze shifts away from him.

“You look so much like him,” she says, her voice taut. “I try to... Whenever I see you, I have to remind myself that he’s dead.”

Jon shifts from foot to foot, unsure what to do with his discomfort.

“I should leave. I’ve been imposing long enough...”

“That’s not what I meant,” Catelyn interrupts him briskly. “I want you here. This is your home. I have been trying to make that clear. It’s just that it can be difficult, sometimes, to look at you and not see Ned’s ghost.”

“I see.”

And perhaps he does, to some extent, though he wishes they’d had this conversation sooner, and then maybe he wouldn’t have felt like such an intruder as he carried the board games and the sewing equipment out of his room.

“I could...” Catelyn reaches down to grab something below the table. She sets her laptop sleeve down between them. “You could read some of mine,” she suggests. “As an apology, because I’ve read yours.”

She sounds so embarrassed, and she looks so reluctantly apologetic, with her mouth set in a line and her cheeks flaming red, that Jon can’t help but smile.

“Yeah,” he says, walking around the table to accept the extended laptop. “Yeah, I’d like that.” And refusing to think twice about it, he goes and kisses her blushing cheek.

“Thanks,” he whispers.

Let her wonder if this is gratitude, or some form of retaliation for the awkwardness of the past few months. He doesn’t know himself. Maybe it doesn’t matter if it’s a bit of both.

 

 

 

 

 

 

_ Trapped in  ice, and with the lands beyond it having been reclaimed by the fast-growing forest, the town seemed dead. Barred store fronts and high banks of snow gave it the distant appearance of one of these old world settlements that has been drowned and preserved in lava. _

_ The detective knew, however, that you need only look closer to spot signs of life - the usual struggles of men visible beneath the ice - these northern towns were moving, still, if at a slower pace than the rest of the world, one that made every gesture, every word seem more dramatic and potent than they would have seemed in the south. _

_ The northerners came to behave like the trees and the winds and the lakes and the falling snow. They endured. _

_ It made them this much harder to kill, and this much harder to understand.  _

 

Catelyn Tully,  _ The Wolves of Winterfell  _


End file.
